Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has angrily rejected an International Criminal Court’s ruling that paves the way for a war crimes probe into the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, condemning it as “pure anti-Semitism”.
“As Prime Minister of Israel, I can assure you this: we will fight this perversion of justice with all our might,” he said on Sunday AEDT.
“This is pure anti-Semitism.”
On Friday, the ICC ruled that it has jurisdiction over the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories, paving the way for the tribunal to open a war crimes investigation.
ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda had asked the court for its legal opinion on whether its reach extended to areas occupied by Israel, after announcing in 2019 that she wanted to start a full probe.
The ICC said its judges had “decided, by majority, that the court’s territorial jurisdiction in the situation in Palestine … extends to the territories occupied by Israel since 1967, namely Gaza and the West Bank, including east Jerusalem”.
Palestine is a state party to the court, having joined in 2015, but Israel is not a member.
Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the Six Day War of 1967, and later annexed mostly Arab east Jerusalem.
Read the article in The Australian (AFP).